Emergent Research

EMERGENT RESEARCH is focused on better understanding the small business sector of the US and global economy.

Authors

The authors are Steve King and Carolyn Ockels. Steve and Carolyn are partners at Emergent Research and Senior Fellows at the Society for New Communications Research. Carolyn is leading the coworking study and Steve is a member of the project team.

Videos

Disclosure Policy

Emergent Research works with corporate, government and non-profit clients. When we reference organizations that have provided us funding in the last year we will note it.
If we mention a product or service that we received for free or other considerations, we will note it.

"the growing adoption of artificial intelligence in the workplace and the expansion of the workforce to include both on- and off-balance-sheet talent."

As their chart below shows (click to enlarge), they see the future workforce being made up of four types of workers.

More interesting is their view about how the relationship between corporations and off-balance sheet workers is going to evolve.

They see corporations hiring two broad types of independent workers. One group - the transactional remote worker - is hired for short term assignments, often through an app or some 3rd party platform. Think hiring people via Amazon Turk to categorize pictures, etc.

The other group - outside contractors - will increasingly work on hybrid teams with traditional employees.

These outside contractors will also tend to stay connected with their client organizations for longer periods of time. Key quote:

As the alternative worker shifts to more rapidly evolving work, the way that work is done is likely to change, moving from short-term transactional remote worker to longer-term relationships that help to accelerate learning and performance improvement.